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DVD Review HTF REVIEW: The Fly - Collector's Edition (1 Viewer)

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Well,if David Prior IS reading this thread, can I just say that this is one of the best discs ever released. The documentary may well be the best ever made for the format. I like THE FLY very much but rabid fans must be in seventh heaven with this. No doubt about it - this is one of the DVDs of the year. :emoji_thumbsup:
 

Ed St. Clair

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Kudos to Fox for a insert!
I was not a big insert fan (single page, I am a fan of booklets), chapter list big deal (did enjoy if they used original art work). However, I did miss them when they disappeared. The packaging always seemed cheap w/o them.

The "fly" on the FBI Warning, is priceless!!!

Anyone wish to comment on Fly1 content on special features on Fly2 SE?
 

Mark Cappelletty

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Paul Prischman (I hope I'm spelling that right), who's worked with Charlie De Lauzirika in the past, did the FLY II disc. The documentary about the entire FLY series is a Fox Movies production done by Kevin Burns, who does a lot of in-house work for Fox (and did the STAR WARS OT documentary).

I've only had a chance to scan through both discs but am incredibly impressed with the content. The "Butterfly" coda was rumored for so long, but no one would ever say anything about it. I'm glad I've seen it, but it sure doesn't work. Too bad about Cronenberg not appearing in the documentary, even if briefly, but it's understandable that he felt he said all he could in the commentary. Would really have liked to see what FLY II screenwriters Mick Garris and Frank Darabont had to say about the development of the film, however.

With the inclusion of the deleted scenes here, I wish WB/Morgan Creek pushed Cronenberg to include the infamous second dream sequence in DEAD RINGERS to their extras-skimpy DVD.

I agree about the great fly FBI warning screens. But man does Fox need to dump that horrible anti-piracy spot. It is the epitome of "sticking out like a sore thumb."

PS - Speaking of "sticking out like a sore thumb," where the heck is CURSE OF THE FLY?
 

Greg K

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Whew!

I've been deeply immersed in the Plasma Pool lately, as you'd expect. Except my detailed comments/reviews of both Fly CEs in the near future.

For now, all I can say is...this is really, really great stuff. A few minor quibbles (like Ronnie's name being spelled "Roni" on the DVD...must be a David Prior-ism, since he's done it here at HTF), but I don't think any Fly fan will go away disappointed.
 

David Prior

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Quibble away, but her name is Veronica, which is more traditionally shortened to Roni, which is how an ex of mine from Calgary spelled it. You never see it spelled out in the movie, at least that I can recall, so there you go.

At any rate, glad you're enjoying it.

David.
 

David Prior

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There is a reference in the script to her as Ronnie, but there are also plenty of other typos.

Kidding of course. I'll be more dilligent next time.
 

TheBat

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well David.. Very nice job on the documentary.. i wish other older titles would get this kind of treatment.. besides alien, star wars, and spidey 2.. nice to see an adult horror film get a respected dvd..

the documentary was awesome.. so much to know about the making of the movie.. The commentary was also very nice.. it was awesome to see the alternate scenes, deleted scenes, and other cool stuff.. I can see why the stuff was cut for the reason that it was. it was nice to see the the famous deleted scenes.

I know that david did acommentary track.. it would have been nice to him also do the documentary.

I think the fans of the movie will be very happy with the title.

and even for non-fans for that matter.

what other projects are you working on? which you can in say public?

JACOB

PS.. I already thanked David C. at the comic-con.. for changins his mind about showing the deleted scenes.. Now I know what he means about deleted scenes etc. tell him it was worth the wait.
 

dpippel

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I just finished going through all of the extras yesterday and they are just *fantastic*. Very comprehensive. The documentary Fear of the Flesh was fascinating and informative. It was great to see most of principals (sans Cronenberg unfortunately) participating. This is how things should be done - in-depth material, non-fluff documentaries, all anamorphically enhanced. The Fly is one of the best Special Editions of 2005 in my opinion. GREAT job David!

I was wondering of you could answer a question for me about the video quality in Fear of the Flesh. There's a lot of variation. Some of the interview sequences appear washed out and some are digitally "blocky". Others, Jeff Goldblum's and Geena Davis' spots for example, appear to be just OK. I was very surprised at how bad most of the interview footage looked. Can you give us any insight as to what's going on there?
 

Greg K

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I'd not seen it spelled "Roni" until now. In the script it's "Ronnie", in the DVD subtitles it's "Ronnie", in various print materials/interviews, it's "Ronnie", and even in The Fly II's teaser trailer and end credits, it's "Ronnie".

Although, Ve-"roni"-ca does seem more correct, technically.

And I noticed an unfortunate typo in Fear of the Flesh, too. The end credits (I love the fact that they're in the same font/color as the film's main titles) credits "Jeff Goldlum" instead of "Goldblum".


And while we've got Mr. Prior on the line...fabulous job with the monkey-cat restoration. The music choices and sound editing are top-notch.

The scene does suffer from some clunky editing (it's not refined), and Goldblum's performance is somewhat over-the-top (he was likely providing raw material for Cronenberg and Ron Sanders to sculpt editorially), but for a rough cut of a sequence that was dropped early on, it's quite good. I think it would have been better had Goldblum done some ADR for the scene, too. As it stands, his on-set grunts and barking ("No! No! No! No!") don't have as much impact as they could have (and the lack of audio sync at times doesn't help).

Still, I'm growing quite fond of it. Of course, it's not quite what I'd built up in my head, but it's still great to see.

A few more thoughts:

1. The final cut has the advantage of keeping Brundle sympathetic through the end of the film. Also, things don't turn into a Netherworld-ish nightmare until the final sequence, and Brundle doesn't take a scene out to stop verbalizing and perform the monkey-cat experiment.

Indeed, Brundle's motives are quite ambiguous in the scene. Is he trying to recreate his own fusion accident with two other entities and then planning on separating them, or is he performing a "dry run" of his attempt to fuse with Veronica (As Cronenberg alludes to in the commentary, he's trying to "share" his experience with her at the end.)?

The experiment presumably failed because the baboon and the cat were merged PYHSICALLY, not at the genetic level. The result presumably should have been a baboon with cat DNA beginning to mutate it instead of the monkey-cat creature.


Another intriguing hint: when Brundle loses his teeth, the computer screen reads:

GOAL: To refine fusion program

PROBLEM: To reduce to a minimum the percentage of fly in Brundlefly

>SOLUTION: The fusion by gene-splicing of Brundlefly with one or more pure human subjects


Note that the last line is clearly supposed to be the COMPUTER providing the proposed solution (the little arrow prefacing the line and the speed with which the text writes itself makes this apparent). However, the sound effects only feature Brundle's typing, not the "computer writing text" sound effects.

So is this a sound editing error, or did Cronenberg change his mind and decide that Brundle was the one who came up with the "solution" instead of the computer?

2. The monkey-cat scene showcases the "lovely" Stage 4-b makeup (which I think looks great in some shots, not so much in others), which is a nice transition between Stages 4 and 5.

I'm still scratching my head, though. It seems to me that many photos of Stage 4-a seem different than the version seen in the film. Most notably, Brundle has less hair on the top on his head/hairline in the film. Yet Stage 4-b seems to somehow have more hair than Stage 4-a.

3. I noticed that the shot Tim Lucas described as opening the monkey-cat scene, a pan across the junk-littered floor to Brundle's foot and then up his body, doesn't appear in the actual scene (although part of it appears in Fear of the Flesh, if I'm not mistaken). Rather, we get a nice roaming shot that moves around the back of Brundle's head and showcases the three pods.

4. I also noticed that the underlit leg shot amputation I've mentioned before appears in Fear of the Flesh, but not in the scene as presented on the DVD. Hmm. I'm also a bit surprised that Mark Iwrin's sad departure from the film before the last week of shooting wasn't mentioned (although I can certainly understand why. Mark Bierman's own tragic comments were difficult enough to watch).

5. One thing that surprised me--Brundle actually uses his super-strength to wrench the insect leg loose, then severs the remaining gristle with his teeth (instead of gnawing the whole thing off at its base).


All in all, the monkey-cat scene is a fascinating little detour, but the final cut has its advantages, too.

Pro-monkey-cat: the transitional makeup, learning the fate of the baboon, the foreshadowing of the final fusion, the payoff to the "hernia bulge" subplot (first hinted at when Brundle and Tawny are sitting on the bed and he's holding his side), the crazed nature of the scene, etc.

Anti-monkey-cat: Brundle stays more sympathetic without that scene, the really insane events are saved for the end of the movie (so the rest is a slow build-up to it), we follow Ronnie's story directly from learning she's pregnant to the maggot-baby dream, etc.



Also, I noticed that the Second Interview consists mainly of different takes than the version seen in The Fly II. The visual of Goldblum saying "It's possible the teleporter improved me" is the same, though. This scene also seems a bit clunky, since it's a rough cut.

I actually prefer The Fly II's version of the scene, though. Goldblum is more energized and manic (and seems to remember his lines better, too), and there's a subtle hint of the mania to come when he says the line I mentioned above (I love his emphasis on "improved me").

My guess is that The Fly II'a crew went back to the dailies and refined the scene editorially for inclusion in the sequel.


Anyway, I can really see how the final cut of the film takes us exactly where we need to go.
 

David Prior

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Doug, thanks for the kind words. As for the video quality, I haven't had a chance to watch an actual production disc yet, but the master looked as good as we could make it. This was an EXTREMELY low budget project so we had to shoot in DV, but while DigiBeta would have been preferrable, the raw footage looks very good.

However the mpeg compression was very high and very rushed. There is quite a lot of material on the disc and during the last phases of production I instructed the compressionist to favor the film material, namely the deleted scenes, if it came down to a tug of war over bits. Whenever you aggressively compress video material, no matter what the source, the image is going to fall apart. Hopefully I'll get to revist the title for Blu-Ray and give the doc more room to breathe.

Best,

David


P.S.
And Jacob, thanks for the support. Know that I tried everything I could think of to get David C. to do an on camera interview, but he was in the thick of A History of Violence and couldn't spare the time. But in a way I kind of like that everyone in the doc is talking about him, while he remains aloof. It makes him almost a mythic figure.

And since you asked, I'm working with David Fincher on something that's really exciting, a couple of other DVD's for Fox that I'm not sure I can talk about yet, and finishing up a very elaborate short film I've been working on for a while.
 

David Prior

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Doug, give me a specific example of what you think looks bad and I'll spot check it. I wonder if you have a defective disc.
 

Sean Laughter

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One question, that may seem silly, but every picture I've seen of this set has a black cover, but I picked a copy of the collector's edition up at Barnes & Noble the other day (definately paid more there, but I really wanted this set :) ) and it had a white cover. I read it carefully and it seems to be the collector's edition - has the documentary and everything, just seemed odd that all the cover shots I'd seen of this has a black cover - even the advert insert in the case advertising the two collector's editions shows the set with a black cover. What color is everyone else's sets?
 

RickER

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Sean, the slip cover that goes over is black. The disc package under it is white. Maybe they didn't want to be bothered with the slip sleaves? Anyway it is the same disc.
 

dpippel

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Thanks for the response David. I can't do it right now but tomorrow I'll give you some specific time checks to look at if you'd like. I doubt that it's a defective disc though. The more likely explanation seems to be what you mentioned when you said it was an extremely low budget video project that suffers from aggressive MPEG compression. The *film* material in the documetary looks stellar.
 

Vincent-P

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Jan 19, 2004
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David,
I know you probably can't really tell me, but please tell me that the David Fincher project is an SE of The Game!! I would soooooo love to see that! Fincher is one of my favorite directors and it's the only one of his films I don't own on DVD yet due to the current disc being barebones and rumors of an SE floating around around for awhile.
 

Haden

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Agreed. We are long overdue for a special edition of The Game. The current barebones disc pales in comparison to the SEs for all of Fincher's other movies. I'm tired of hearing people rave about the Criterion laserdisc version, which I'll never get to see. :frowning:
 

Mark Hawley

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Great DVD! Aside from the documentary and deleted scenes, I was really happy to see the Cinefex and American Cinematograher articles included. I got a real kick out seeing that the AC issue that had articles on "The Fly" had "Howard the Duck" on the cover. I think it's safe to say they picked the wrong film for a cover story that month!
 

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